When Does DeployLX Ask to Reactivate?

When using the Activation Limit in DeployLX Licensing customers may occasionally be asked to reactive their licenses. This article will cover the most common circumstances and resolutions. 

The Hardware has Changed More Than Allowed

The most obvious reason that the user is asked to activate a second time is when they've modified their computer components. When you create the license, you can control how many changes are required before they are asked to activate - this is the Tolerance value. Each component is given a different weight. When the combined changes are more than the allowed tolerance, the user will be prompted to re-active.

Each component change considers 3 possible weights, in this order:

  1. Moved: If the license file itself has been physically moved on the hard drive.
  2. Partial: When multiple instances of a component (multiple graphics cards for example) are present, and DeployLX can only match a portion of the instances it will consider them a partial match.
  3. Weight: The default weight when the other two conditions don't apply.

Default Component Weights

Component Weight Partial Moved Description
MAC Address 3 1 3 The MAC addresses of all enabled network cards. The network card does not need to be active, but if it is manually disabled in either the OS or BIOS, DeployLX will not be able to discover it.
CPU 1 1 2 The id of the CPU returned by CPUID This does not include any CPU "serial number" which only appeared for a short time in Pentium III chips.
System Drive 3 2 3 The physical serial number of the hard drive where Windows is installed.
Memory 1 1 1 The total amount of physical memory.
CD-ROM 1 1 1 The brand and model of CD-ROM drives in the machines.
Video Card 1 1 1 The brand and model numbers of the video cards in the machine.
IDE 1 1 1 The model of the IDE controller on the motherboard.
SCSI 1 1 1 The model of the SCSI controller on the motherboard.

Comparing Hardware

When DeployLX profiles a machine it generates a unique fingerprint representing the hash of all components found during the profile. The profile hash cannot be used to determine the exact hardware components on the machines but two profiles can be used to compare the differences between machines.

See How-to: Determine the Differences Between Machines to learn how to compare two profiles for changes.

Sometimes the results from the comparison tool don't match the customer's expectations or a component seems to change each time the machine is profiled. When this happens, you can use the Profile Helper to capture diagnostic profiles of the machine. Submit these profiles to XHEO for analysis.

The License File Has Moved

When Invalidate on File Moved is selected in hardware profile list, DeployLX will automatically ignore any existing activation for the license regardless of how similar the profiles may be - even for exact matches.

This feature is intended to combat users that ghost their hard drives, deactivate the license and then restore the drive. DeployLX detects that the license file was not restored to the exact physical location on the hard drive and invalidates the existing activation.

On occasion the license file is moved by a defragger that ignores the system and read-only flags placed on the license file. Most defraggers can be configured to ignore certain files explicitly. When ignoring files, be sure to add the original location of the license file as well as [Common Application Data]\XHEO INC\SharedLicenses and [AppData]\IsolatedStorage.

The License has Changed

By default DeployLX will always try to use an existing license on the machine before looking for a new license. If you re-build your assemblies and copy them over an existing instance (during installation for example) DeployLX will use the license file from the previous installation, unless you've modified the license embedded in the assembly.

Each time you make a change to the license in DeployLX, it increments the Release Version. When the release version of the license embedded in the assembly is greater than the license already present on the machine, DeployLX will ignore the old license and use the new embedded license. Since the activation details are stored in the license file and signed at the server DeployLX cannot migrate the old activation and the user is prompted to activate again.

Published : Aug 13, 2009
Updated : Jan 04, 2012
Views : 7186
  • licensing
  • deploylx
  • activation
  • hardware-locking

Downloads

Folder